


The white whale.

by orange_crushed



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Castiel, Future Fic, Implied Future Character Death, M/M, Past Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-10
Updated: 2013-07-12
Packaged: 2017-12-18 09:47:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/878439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orange_crushed/pseuds/orange_crushed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They are nothing like the men he knew, and yet, from time to time, the light is right or their expressions shift in such a way. They act generously, or out of anger, out of tenderness, out of guilt. They grill or drive to work or rake the yard while Castiel watches, and for a long second he is in front of Lisa Braeden's house again, watching red leaves turn into piles. Watching Dean shake open plastic trash bags and fill them and take them to the curb. Wishing he could speak, and not speaking. Saying nothing. Turning away. Sometimes, Castiel thinks what he is really looking for, is punishment.</p><p> </p><p>(<i>Future fic, assuming an alternate ending to season 8.</i>)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

I.

There are currently fifty-seven living Winchesters and Campbells in the contiguous United States. They are the cousins John and Mary never knew, or else discarded in their wakes: second, distant. One of them is very probably going to die within the week: Harvey Winchester, called Harry, also called pop-pop, also called darling and jelly bean by Monica Winchester, née McAllister. Monica will remember him after he's gone- heart failure being most likely- but she will remember him most vividly at thirty-five, a man with broad shoulders and a shy, private smile, face freshly shaved, smelling like the woods after a rain, bringing the dog and the mail back indoors. Human memory is selective and often illogical: he was only thirty-five for one year of their lives, but that's where the marker is placed, the intangible anchor that settled in her deep, and never drifted. But Harry's problems- and Harry's joys, Harry's nights and noontimes- are close to ended. There are other Winchesters to worry about: Devon Winchester Lee, son of Annie, born prematurely nine days ago. He is small but he will live, he will grow taller and wider and learn to ride a bike. He will eventually control his asthma. He will eventually die. They will all eventually die.

But still: fifty-seven. It's not nothing. And more will come, they always come. It's the one comfort he clings to, from the back of school auditoriums and the hallways of hospitals and parking lots outside of office buildings, from flights of stairs and backseats of cars. More will always come: human beings are, essentially, perennials. Weedy, stubborn, impossible to dig out. He's very grateful for such things. He watched a nine-year-old Annie perform a solo in her third-grade choir, and now he watches her pace the room in front of an incubator with her hands curled over her heart. She is praying- not to him, nor to anyone in particular- but her earnest praying, like so many Winchesters, is also punctuated with vague threats. Perhaps it's genetic. Her parents were real estate agents, not hunters: they did not teach her how to threaten God.

"I swear," she whispers. "I fucking swear, if you take him," she puts a hand over her mouth, and hot tears well in the corners of her eyes.

Castiel bends over the incubator and slips his hands inside: invisible, intangible, incorporeal. He has had decades upon decades of practice at navigating the human world without leaving a trace, a sign. He is very good at making extra snacks fall unexpectedly out of the vending machine, and he is very good at this. He puts a hand on the infant's head, fingers spanning the small skull easily, and thinks about sunlight, tree branches extending upwards, strong in the root. After a minute, the monitors are steadier. They will grow steadier still, in the next hours. Annie prays through the night, but Castiel is already gone again. Angel Martinez- second daughter of Linda Lopez-Martinez, born Linda Lopez, only child of Jenny and Joanna Campbell-Lopez- has a school entrance exam in the morning, and is finding it difficult to sleep. Her nightmares are all of failing the test, of failing her parents, of running away and living in the grocery store dumpsters. It's vivid but unlikely: there are fences around those dumpsters, and Angel's parents and sisters will love her regardless of her performance. He gives her dreams of gardens: tall flowers and cool ponds, the croaking of frogs and the smell of lilacs. He can't take the exam for her. He's tried that with others, and it ends badly. His grasp of mathematics and the chemical sciences is faultless, but his approach to critical analysis of human literature will probably always be slightly off-mark. A white whale, he knows, cannot be God. It can only be a whale: _physeter macrocephalus_ , warm-blooded, hungry for squid. What other people think about it, is really their own business.

Angel stops turning in her sleep, and Castiel vanishes again: somewhere, a Winchester is dropping his phone into a toilet bowl, and praying it's not broken. Castiel does not bother with the phone- cracked screens are beneath even him- but he rides shotgun, invisibly, all the way home, to ensure that irritation over a plastic trinket does not translate into running stop signs and making foolish judgments regarding speed. It wouldn't be the first time he's scraped a Winchester off a median, but he prefers an ounce of prevention. After that, it's quiet for a long time. Castiel retreats to the ether, to the no-place, to everywhere, a spot between the earth and stars. He sits on a park bench in the small hours of the morning, watching the thin, high clouds pull apart slowly. And then in the moment before dawn there is a small sensation, a tug, barely even a ripple in his extended consciousness, but he knows: fifty- _six_.

"Goodbye, Harry," he says, in the direction of the clouds. More will always come. The mantra: more will always come, and he'll be here.

 

 

Julian- youngest son of David Campbell- is in love for the first time. Castiel sits with him in his room for a while, as Julian stares at candid pictures of Shonda on the screen of his comm tablet. In the video captures she smiles and laughs and tells Julian to turn the camera off. Julian's thoughts are surprisingly innocent for a boy of nineteen, and Castiel is struck- he's always struck, it seems, these days- at their sincerity. Julian is imagining what their children would look like, with Shonda's thick curls and infectious grin, and his eyes. Castiel can picture them, too. Easily. He was present for Julian's birth. He was a wide-eyed infant with a thick shock of hair; and later, a child with an endearing inability to correctly pronounce "zero." He is exceptionally tall in a way that his father was not. He reminds Castiel of Sam more than anyone has in the last forty years. Julian sighs and puts his face down against the comm screen, thinking about what a huge dumb baby he's being.

"If it's any consolation," Castiel tells him, inaudibly, incorporeal again, "nearly all of your relatives have had that particular thought at some point." Castiel leaves when Julian starts to rhythmically thump his head against the desk with an air of misery; people deserve their privacy, he's been told.

He visits a nursing home and a factory that afternoon. Later he trails a Winchester cousin on an early morning run that turns into a donut run when they're certain nobody can see them. Castiel sits in a booth opposite and watches him- Aaron, freckled, plain-faced, stocky- eat a maple bacon danish with an expression of fatuous glee. "Try pie," Castiel tells him. Other people might have found that hilarious. In context. But Aaron cannot hear him, and so he merely orders a bag of muffins to go. Castiel is going to leave him in the plaza parking lot, when he inhales the morning air and finds it slightly tainted. An uncomfortably familiar smell, but one he hasn't sensed in more than a decade. Sulfur. Reeking and arid. He stares between the rows of vehicles and the empty lot beyond, at the faint flicker of the streetlights, and his eyes rest on a man slumped against the car charging station. Aaron walks on, blithely unaware, headphones blaring. Castiel considers just whisking him out of there and dealing with whatever this is later, but it's too late: the man lurches forward, blocking Aaron's path, swaying a little. His eyes are black and crusted at the edges, as if fire leaked out once, singing everything it touched.

"Winchester," the demon hisses. Aaron slowly pulls his headphones off.

"Huh?"

"Winchester," it repeats. "Yes, I know you." Aaron looks dumbfounded, but Castiel takes the opportunity to study the creature more closely. It shouldn't be here- shouldn't be possible- but here it is. Castiel can see the brands on its arms, fresh scarring over old, in layer upon layer. It's unspeakably disgusting. So it's been locking itself in this body for decades, struggling to keep above ground, while Hell tugs insistently at its strings, calling it home. The Gates were shut many years ago, and no demon now has passage. This one is old, smart, and hanging on by sheer will, the skin of its teeth, fingernails. Castiel experiences a brief flare of embarrassment at having missed one. "You did this to us," the demon says, sticking out its forearms. "Your blood kin."

"Dude," says Aaron. "Are you high?" The demon laughs. 

"Tell the angel to come out and play," it says. Castiel sets his shoulders and makes himself visible; Aaron jumps backwards about three feet, into a Toyota.

" _What_?" Aaron yells.

"Hello," says Castiel, feeling like a complete idiot. "Don't be afraid."

The demon takes advantage of that moment by lunging at Castiel, but it's not really a fair fight. Its vessel is tearing at the seams already, and it only takes a firm twist and a little leverage for Castiel to get his hand around the demon's face. It claws at him, but he hangs on and lets his grace burn off through his fingertips and palms, lets it flood into the eyes and mouth while the demon shrieks and spits and finally sags in his arms. He lets the body go, and it slumps to the ground, a mass of blood and embers. 

"Oh my _God_ ," says Aaron.

"Not for some time now," Castiel says, before he can stop himself. Aaron stares at him. Once again, a completely fine joke wasted on the wrong audience.

He wipes Aaron's memory and leaves him asleep in a hammock in his own backyard, then goes back for the body. It's rotted and charred in places where the demon leaked out over the years. He wonders who taught it to do that: to stay on earth, to burn the signs into its skin. If there was one, there might be more. The fact that it was looking for a Winchester, and found one- even the most incredibly un-Winchestery Winchester Castiel's observed in a while- is unsettling. It suggests an organized search of some kind. A hunt. He will make a greater effort from now on, to observe their surroundings, their comings and goings, who watches them when they are out in public. He will ward houses and windows, he will draw sigils on rooftops. He will be more vigilant. There is a crack here, somewhere, and things are slipping through. First things first: he will alert the People of Letters.

He appears outside the bunker, still carrying the corpse, knocks on the door, and enters his personal code on the old keypad. There is a biometric scanner that they use for everyone else, but Castiel can't touch it without shorting the system. They prefer him not to do that. He backs up, turns, and waves to the security cameras. After a minute, the door opens a crack. A young woman holding a shotgun stares at him from the hallway.

"Jesus H. Christ, Castiel," says Amelia, daughter of Steven, youngest son of Deanna, oldest child of Krissy Chambers. She looks at the mess in his arms. "Who the hell was that?"

 

 

"Sick," says Jerome, descendant of Josephine Barnes. He circles the body on the lab table, leaning in here and there to study a particular symbol or note an old wound. "Nasty. Wow." He looks up at Castiel, oddly excited. "You know, I've never seen a demon. Not in real life." 

"It's not a demon anymore," Castiel says. "Just a mutilated vessel."

"How is this possible?" Amelia stands at the head of the table, arms folded, expression grim. "They all got flushed like a hundred years ago."

"Most, apparently," Castiel says. "But not _all_." He lifts up one scarred wrist and looks down the length of the arm. He can read the sigils, but they're mainly gibberish. He doesn't know how they could have worked. "These bound the demon to its vessel. But they weakened over time and needed to be re-branded. Again and again. This demon was already walking the earth in your great-grandmother's time." He remembers Krissy with perfect accuracy: slight and short and wary, like a cat chased too many times, quick to bite. She adored Dean and tolerated everyone else, and kept her weapons spotless. She was not especially unlike the woman in front of him. 

"Are there others?"

"I don't know." Castiel shrugs. "I'll search for them. But if they exist, they've kept themselves hidden this long."

"You said it wanted a Winchester," says Hannah, from the doorway. She steps in, carefully not looking at the corpse, and threads her arms between Amelia's, resting her chin on Amelia's shoulder. Amelia- guarded, tense, characteristically prickly- leans unconsciously into her weight, and Castiel tries not to smile at the small intimacy. Hannah, it seems, is making inroads. He's not entirely surprised: she is a Tran, after all, and her strategies are generally sound. As is her logic. "So it either managed to stumble across one, or it's been hunting."

"Correct."

"You think it wanted that Winchester in particular?" Hannah wonders aloud. "Some kind of grudge?" Castiel shakes his head. "Then they're all potentially targets. And so are we, if they make the connection between the Winchesters and this place." He hadn't considered that yet, but it is certainly true.

"We're good," Amelia says. Her arms tighten around Hannah's. "Watch the civilians."

"Closely," he assures her. 

"Can you translate these?" Jerome asks, wiggling the dead arm a little. "I want to check them against some stuff I've been seeing in the archives."

"Of course."

"Okay," says Amelia. "Let us know what pops up. We'll be checking for omens, deaths, any weirdness. Anything comes across the cortex, we'll buzz you." He nods and there's a stiff silence for a minute, like they are all expecting him to disappear immediately. He realizes this is mostly his fault. He has never truly been able to break the habit of punctuating a conversation by absenting it.

"Want to stay for lunch?" Hannah asks, at last.

"Yes," he says, and wonders at himself, that he means it. "Thank you."

 

 

He visits all the infants first, the Winchester and Campbell children in their cribs and cradles and what he has been told are "pack and plays." When demons wanted a Winchester before, they began with a child. He could not forget that. So he stands guard over them, almost simultaneously, by quantum-shifting as rapidly as he can between locations. There are nine children. He focuses on them for a week, following them to daycare and pre-school and to the homes of relatives and friends. He watches them laugh and clap and stuff toys in their mouths, and once pulls a small pair of fingers out of a light socket just in time. Castiel is far beyond caring what effect his actions have on the future, on what people call destiny: a thousand years ago, or two hundred, he might have stood aside and let events play out, because of his surety in the grand design. There is still a design, he believes that firmly. His faith is dented, not gone. He is simply willing to- as Dean used to say- fuck it all up, if he feels like it. Muddy the waters. Color outside the lines. He has many more metaphors that would apply here, but perhaps it's not wise to spend them all in the same place.

Nothing comes for the babies.

He drops in on the older Winchesters more or less randomly after that, making sure to vary his schedule so that he is with them at mornings, noons, and night-times almost evenly. He is with them when they brush their teeth and take their lunch breaks, when they visit the bathroom alone, when they fall into bed singly or tumble together with someone. He averts his eyes, but does not immediately depart: at least one Winchester has slept with a demon willingly, so he does not discount the possibility. He examines their true faces closely, but on the off-chance that they have somehow managed more sophisticated disguises, he also whispers _Christo_ into the darkness of bedrooms and waits for a flinch. It doesn't come. Instead, Aaron the donut eater sits up in bed and whispers to his on-again, off-again girlfriend: " _I think I've got ghosts_." Nobody can see him, but Castiel does roll his eyes.

More weeks go by on his protection duty, and he gets a call from Amelia. He was expecting it: the night before, he got a prayer from Hannah. _Dear Castiel, we found something. Let's talk soon._ She does not pray often, but her prayers are bright and warm, like the flame of a tea light in the dark. They are almost always on behalf of someone else. He does not have the heart to tell her that she does not need to begin prayers like a letter, with a salutation. If he is being honest, he likes the sound of it.

"Hello," he says, into the earpiece. He continues to hate the development of cell phone technology, and resents being made to wear the thimble-sized communicator. "What did you find?"

"Got a body in Iowa, some John Doe. The guy's burned around the eyes like this one, arms all marked up. Thought we could Bureau our way in there, if you've got time."

"I have time," he says, and shifts himself to the front door of the bunker. "I'm here."

"Uh," says Amelia. There's a pause. "Okay." After a few minutes, the door to the bunker opens, and Amelia is there in front of him with her feet bare and her hair still piled in a knot on top of her head. "I'm not sure I'm ever going to get completely used to that," she says. When she's ready, he takes them to the Polk County coroner's office, where they bluff their way in by a combination of doctored holo-chip badges, Amelia's ability to inject false charm into most encounters, and Castiel's ability to stand silently like a boring bureaucratic hardass. So he's been told. They're left alone with the body in an examination room. Castiel lifts an arm and sniffs it- pungent sulfur, obvious even to Amelia from the look on her face. The eyes are ringed in scabby burns, and the arms layered in signs and scorched sigils. "Perfect match," Amelia says, scowling. "Lovely. We're so lucky." She rests gloved hands on her hips. "Any Winchesters in the area?"

"None in this state," he says. No Campbells either, but he does not bother saying that.

"Then I don't have a fucking clue," she sighs. "Should we take the body back? Jerome will want to compare the signs on the arms. And probably take tissue samples or whatever." She shakes her head and thinks to herself- privately- but loud enough that Castiel picks it up without trying: _fucking gross ugh seen enough oozing bodies God I'm gonna have myself cremated when I go_. 

Castiel transports Amelia and the body back to the bunker, and they deposit the corpse in one of the lab's stasis pods. Amelia goes to get Jerome and Hannah, and Castiel is left alone for a moment with his thoughts. Sam would have loved this room: a medical center and first-rate analysis lab, with all the technology they used to steal and pick locks to access. Amelia's father had it installed, along with the biometrics. If Castiel concentrates he can imagine them in here, still dressed like last-century FBI agents, arguing over some meaningless detail, leaning down to look through one of the microscopes, draping their jackets over the back of the rolling chairs. Sam would be studying the markings on the arms, insisting he'd seen something like them before. Dean would look up at Castiel and say-

"It's like dead demon Christmas around here," Jerome says, rubbing his hands together. Castiel smiles cautiously, and Jerome claps him on the shoulder, delighted. "You got me a matching set!"

"You're welcome," says Castiel.

 

 

II.

He has been sitting on the roof of the bunker for several hours now when he feels it, the rush of wings, the displacement of air beside him. It's been years. Two decades. A blink of an eye for them, and for him, really; but down here, everything is slower. Infinitely longer, and yet never long enough. How maddening: humanity's subjective perception of time is creeping into his calculations. He knows who it is before he turns around; he's not cut off from that knowledge, at least. But he was expecting someone else. Not an old friend. Ambriel, maybe. Someone diplomatic and full of platitudes. He is used to being treated like a loaded gun, a child at the edge of a tantrum.

"Hello, Kerubiel."

"You were seen in Heaven," Kerubiel tells him, with no preamble. "The Winchester Heaven. Weeding a garden." It's a clear and perfect night, with thousands of stars spraying trails across the sky. The air is crisp, stinging, but neither of them feel it. Castiel misses the sight of human breath puffing out into the cold, making little clouds of steam that linger after exhalation. He tries to imitate it now, while Kerubiel stares at him, but the best he can do is summon up a minor wind. His breath comes out but it's not human breath, not exactly. It's not warm, the way it needs to be. "Someone looked in on them after all this time, and saw you there. For a moment they thought it was really you," Kerubiel tells him. "They didn't stop to think-" he pauses, and Castiel says nothing. "Foolish. There's no Presence in a memory. But you can imagine the alarm they raised. They searched everywhere." His voice is quiet suddenly, as if angelic eavesdropping could be put off by lowering the volume. Castiel doesn't care: they're listening, or they're not. He can't prevent them from doing as they please. "But of course it wasn't you," Kerubiel adds. "Was it?"

"No," says Castiel. "It's a place I've never been."

"Promise me you'll stay away," Kerubiel says. "Banishment is no small thing. You're sealed. If they caught you, trying to enter Heaven-"

"They won't," Castiel tells him. "I'm busy here." Kerubiel nods and goes silent, and after a moment he vanishes. Castiel is left alone. _I'm busy here_. He considers it. It's mostly true, in that it is not a lie. But it is not the whole truth. Almost nothing is. The whole truth is more complicated: I am busy here, because I cannot be there. I make myself useful in the one way left open to me. 

He remembers the garden: he knows instantly what memory the others saw and mistook for an encroachment, a breach in accord. He wonders if it was the first time, or one of many, on some infinite loop. The human mind- truly, the human soul, in such a place- summons things up by association, feeling. It would be Dean's memory, not Sam's. Sam was inside the bunker, making sandwiches, and Castiel and Dean were bent over in the vegetable beds, pulling out grass and dandelions. It was a rare day of quiet, in late spring. Castiel had tried to help Dean with the garden while he was still in his coat and jacket and wingtips, and Dean had laughed hysterically at the sight of him holding a trowel, with mud-stained knees. He'd given Castiel a set of his own clothes- worn jeans and a faded shirt- and they had worked in companionable silence for hours. The sun had been hot on their backs and the earth cool on their hands, and every time Dean looked at him, Dean had smiled. And now this memory is enshrined with Dean in Heaven, where Castiel cannot ever be again. He wonders if Dean can tell- if Dean knows, when he looks across at Castiel, in his memories, that he is seeing something past and gone. That he is looking at an absence, forever unfilled. Or maybe he's happy: purely, mindlessly, digging in the garden, his skin freckling further and sweat running down his arms, humming in the back of his throat. Maybe they are all eating the sandwiches together in eternity, in the shade of the bunker wall, and Dean knows only how good the bread tastes, how cold the lemonade, how sore his shoulders will be in the morning. Missing nothing. Whole.

When Castiel closes his eyes he can still see him perfectly, stained armpits and dirty elbows and mustard on the corner of his mouth, Dean Winchester. Sturdy root and righteous tree. It's Castiel's heaven. The kind nobody can take.

 

 

.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Doesn't the devil live forever;  
> who ever heard that the devil was dead?"  
> -Herman Melville


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I'm in Maryville," she says. "Missouri." She is talking to someone else then, for a minute: an automated fast food attendant, probably. She fumbles with the comm and Castiel can hear it fall down, below one of the seats. She swears, muffled, and Castiel looks up at the sky above Albuquerque. There is nothing on her ribs keeping him blind to her location, but she does not like it when he simply appears in the seat next to hers, so he must endure this ridiculous ritual. Neither Hannah nor Jerome are this difficult about transport.
> 
> "Be specific," he says.

III.

"This is adapted from the demon alphabet," Castiel says, indicating a long line of marks on the right forearm. Jerome and Amelia lean closer, and Hannah leans back. "In English: _though far away, I am carried here, I come_."

"A summons?" Hannah asks. He nods. "What for?"

"I don't know." He turns the arm over, points to a brand beneath the wrist, and several others overlapping it. "It could have something to do with these. Hebrew letters, manipulated into sigils. This is _sheol_ , realm of the dead. Here, _gehenna_. The pit. This is a crude map of Hell. It's possible this demon wished to raise others, but sought a specific location."

"But they can't, right?" Amelia glances around their small circle. "I thought that door was shut."

"It was," Castiel says. 

" _Was_? What, they missed a spot?"

"The Winchesters closed Hell," Castiel says, tightly. "With the force of Heaven behind them. Have any of you ever seen a living demon? Thousands walked free, then. Many died to-"

"Okay," says Amelia. She shrugs, palms up: clearly not angling for an argument. He tries to relax his expression. "Okay, we get it. Good job, Winchesters. I'm not saying they messed up, I'm really not. I'm just saying, it's been a long time. Is it possible that things are, I dunno- breaking down? Fraying at the edges?"

"Theoretically, no," he says. "A seal is a seal."

"But?" Jerome prompts.

"In my experience," Castiel says, "theory and reality have very little to do with one another, where Hell is concerned."

 

 

He leaves them when they begin to drift out of the lab, arguing about take-out food and whose turn it is to drive into town for the pickup. Cars now are silent things that hum- static, electric- along the surface of the ground, with touch-screens inside to control the atmosphere. They don't rumble and squeal and require an abundance of processed fossil fuels. They do not have tape decks. Sometimes he rides shotgun with Amelia when she is hunting alone, tracking a werewolf or a ghoul or a woman in white, one of the stragglers of the haunted world. In a future without demons, people still die violently, and leave unsettled ghosts. There are still hunters, though not many. 

Without a clear course of action, he returns to the Winchesters and the Campbells for a while, tracking their motions, routine and otherwise. Devon Winchester Lee is home from the hospital, and several pounds heavier. Castiel stands in the nursery and when Devon wakes, Castiel makes the mobile above his crib rotate slowly, soundlessly, until the child falls back into a restless sleep.

Dean and Sam left no children behind. Not even illegitimate, undiscovered ones: Castiel knows this, because he searched every inch of their checkered pasts, long ago. He doesn't know what he hoped to find. It simply would have been something else to visit, instead of a grave: a broad-shouldered man or a freckled woman, someone with the habit of opening beer bottles on countertops, someone who laughed easily and took pleasure in leftover meatloaf. Sometimes when he watches them, these far-flung Winchesters and Campbells, he wonders what on earth he is looking for: comfort, or purpose. He cannot help them, any of them, not really. They will never know what he is. They don't care. They are nothing like the men he knew, and yet, from time to time, the light is right or their expressions shift in such a way. They act generously, or out of anger, out of tenderness, out of guilt. They grill or drive to work or rake the yard while Castiel watches, and for a long second he is in front of Lisa Braeden's house again, watching red leaves turn into piles. Watching Dean shake open plastic trash bags and fill them and take them to the curb. Wishing he could speak, and not speaking. Saying nothing. Turning away. Sometimes, Castiel thinks what he is really looking for, is punishment.

Other times: Devon stirs and puts one miniature fist to his mouth, and Castiel watches his dreams. They're full of sound and color, strange shapes, a woman's face that rotates above his world like a bright sun. They are simple, wordless dreams. They are full of love.

 

 

"Amelia," he answers, into the tiny, irritating communicator. "Where should I meet you?"

"I'm in Maryville," she says. "Missouri." She is talking to someone else then, for a minute: an automated fast food attendant, probably. She fumbles with the comm and Castiel can hear it fall down, below one of the seats. She swears, muffled, and Castiel looks up at the sky above Albuquerque. There is nothing on her ribs keeping him blind to her location, but she does not like it when he simply appears in the seat next to hers, so he must endure this ridiculous ritual. Neither Hannah nor Jerome are this difficult about transport.

"Be specific," he says.

"Cooper Street, by the church. I'm headed there now. Hannah looked it up on the satellite link, it's one of those new apartment blocks."

"I'll be there."

He arrives at the end of the street and walks slowly down it, looking casually at the houses and up the driveways, not certain what it is he's supposed to be seeing. The land is flat, dry, and scrubby; the grass is dead in patches, but the little gardens seem lovingly tended. A German Shepherd barks at him from behind a chain link fence, eager, welcoming. He walks a square around the block, through the church parking lot, and stops to admire the restored stained glass windows. Gregory Barbarigo, he remembers: a bookworm at heart. Never happier than in a pile of manuscripts, or smelling fresh ink. Castiel walks on, thinking about Venice, canals, libraries. After a little while, Hannah's nondescript coupe pulls up to the curb a few buildings down. She gets out, scanning for him, and smiles when she sees him.

"You want a burger?" She waves a white paper sack in his direction. "I got two, in case." He takes what's offered and thanks her, and they eat in comfortable silence, leaning against the hood of the car. The protein supplements they use in fast food are not quite the same as ground beef used to be- greasy, heavy, rich- but the taste's very similar. And he's found he likes this chain's pickles. "So I bet you're wondering, why here," she says, chewing a last mouthful and sucking the mustard off her thumb. He stays silent. "We did some digging on the John Doe from Des Moines." She leans into the window, pulls a tablet off the front seat, and taps a file. Castiel leans closer. "George Moreno, employee of the month at MondoShopMart. Turns out he disappeared two months ago, off this street."

"What?" He startles. "No."

"Um, yes." She taps the screen and brings up another photo. It's unmistakably the second body, minus the elaborate scarring. "This is our guy."

"Amelia," he says, through his teeth, "this _cannot_ be him."

"Why not?"

"Hell was shut-"

"We're all super clear on that," she interrupts, coolly. Castiel glares at her. "It's sealed. Fine."

"The only way- the _only_ way a demon _might_ have remained on this plane, is by being locked into a vessel, the way we've seen. A vessel taken _before_ the sealing of Hell. If they left that vessel for any reason- an exorcism, or simply to change bodies- they would have immediately been recalled to Hell. Forever. To be inhabited by a demon, now, here, George Moreno should have disappeared a _century_ ago. Do you understand?"

"So," Amelia thinks. "If George Moreno is a brand-new suit, how'd somebody slip into it?" Castiel nods. Dean would have called it a million-dollar question. "Let's check the house out." They park the car around the back of the apartment block, by the rear entrance. Unsurprisingly, the door is controlled by an integrated biometric touch panel. He is about to simply teleport them inside when Amelia elbows him, full of some private joke. "Wow," she says. "What would I have done without my biometric-scanner-shorting guy?" Castiel frowns at her, but puts his hand to the touchpad, and they watch as the scanner flickers, then all the lights in the building. After a second, there's a fizzling sound, and the lock pops. "Awesome." He tries not to resent the source of her enthusiasm. Once he waged brutal war against the forces of darkness, and now he is breaking and entering for the amusement of Krissy Chambers' great-granddaughter. 

They find the apartment, which has only an older-style keypad lock on the door. It takes Amelia under a minute to crack it, less time than it takes to put her toolkit away. He goes in first. Amelia pulls a gun and follows him, but Castiel holds up a hand to stop her, and goes into the kitchen by himself. There is a man sitting at the little table, with a lined, crusting face. There are no brands on his arms, but his eyes are burned away entirely. He- it- tilts his head upwards at Castiel and smiles. It's not especially pleasant. Certain things become clear to Castiel at once. 

"Howdy, angel," it says. "Looking good."

"Who the hell are you?" Amelia snaps, over Castiel's shoulder. Castiel shifts so that he is firmly between them, and tries not to look visibly irritated. In his experience there has never been a single hunter- not ever- who hung back when they were told to. He tries to think, rapidly, about how best to get Amelia away from here.

"Who am _I_?" it mimics. It puts an affronted hand over its heart. "Who are you, little girl? Besides a future smear on this floor."

"Enough," Castiel says. The lamps tremble. 

"Easy there," The man's unattractive smile widens. "Lots of warm human bodies in this building. Don't want to bring the house down, Castiel." Beside Castiel, Amelia freezes, and the man laughs. "You think I don't know this one, the wanderer? Casper the Friendly Ghost. The last angel on earth. Well," it says. "Almost." Amelia looks between them, puzzled, starting to get mad. Castiel can feel her anger rising, like the drone of bees.

"What does that-"

"Samyaza," says Castiel. "This is not a demon." He turns his head back a fraction, enough to see Amelia's startled face. "Go," he tells her. "Now." 

"No wa-" she starts, and the man rises for Castiel, and many loud and terrible things happen at once. Amelia shoots and is flung across the kitchen and into the fridge; Castiel barely has time to grasp for his blade before hands are around his throat, lifting him easily and pinning him to the wall. He stabs out and is rewarded with a scream. Castiel is thrown into the table, but he doesn't land there; instead he transports himself across the room to Amelia and takes her in mid-flight, and deposits her outdoors by the car. It takes less than a split-second, a fraction of time, but when he appears again in the kitchen, there is only a burned-out corpse on the floor, and the thing that inhabited it is gone. He examines the body, and looks around the rest of the apartment briefly, before going back to Amelia. She points a gun in his face when he manifests suddenly, and then leans heavily back onto the hood of the car. "Gone?" she asks. 

"Gone," he says.

"Shit. Shit. You went for me-"

"It's fine," he tells her. "Are you hurt?"

"I'm good." She waves him off, even though there's a bruise forming on her face and upper arm, and a smear of blood at one corner of her lip. "What was that thing?"

"An angel," says Castiel. For once, Amelia is entirely speechless. And then he feels a tug at his consciousness, a flicker of an uncommon prayer- _hey Castiel oh God please_ \- and startles to action. "We have to go," he says, and takes her wrist. They land outside the bunker. The door is open. Amelia is through it in a second, gun out, heart racing so hard Castiel can feel it from a distance. Her thoughts are a blur: _bunker home no fuck safety shit Hannah Jerome what the hell Hannah HannahHannahannah_. They take the stairs down into chaos: shelves and files have been flung everywhere, tables turned onto their sides, cables torn out everywhere, vidscreens shattered but still blinking faintly, dully, into the grey silence. There are no lights, no sound but the creaks and groans of ruined hardware. 

"Hannah," Amelia whispers, into the dark. " _Hannah_!" she hisses. "Jer!"

"Here!" Jerome calls, from far down the hall. "We're here!" Castiel appears beside him, and finds himself looking down at Jerome, sprawled out on the floor, cradling Hannah in his arms. Jerome looks up. "Castiel," he says, miserably. "She's not-" he tries, and there is a broken sound from the doorway. As Castiel watches, Amelia runs forward and slides onto her knees and hovers over Hannah, touching her face, looking for the pulse in her throat, running her hands over her wrists and mumbling to herself, nonsense, begging. "The dudes in cold storage," Jerome says, sounding stunned. "It was them. They just, they got _up_ , I don't know- and they opened the door for these, _things_. One second they're corpsicles, and then-" he gestures around with his free hand, and notices too late that it's stained with blood. From the look on his face, not his own. "Oh shit," he says. "Oh shit, oh shit." Amelia sees it and her eyes go wide, panicked.

"Hannah, honey," she says. Hannah lies perfectly still in her lap. "Hannah, baby, come _on_ -" she cries. Castiel kneels beside them and gently tugs Amelia away; she scrabbles with him for a minute, blindly terrified, and then relaxes against him, curling away with her arms over her chest. He's not sure he can do this. He puts one hand over the sluggish, seeping wound in Hannah's gut, and another over her eyes. He will try. He's not sure what reserves remain to him, here alone in this place, with all the rest departed, and the barest thread of Heaven out of his reach. He has been spending his grace on skinned knees and sinus infections and the occasional vampire bite for the last hundred years. He has not resurrected anyone since-

-he shuts that thought away, and concentrates. Green leaves and sunlight filtering through, running water rolling over the boulders in a stream. Heartbeat and breath and consciousness: water and air and undertow, electrical current, dandelion seeds rising in the wind. Blood and skin. Warm concrete and dirt. Love.

Hannah inhales.

"Oh my God," says Jerome, awed. "Oh, my good God." Amelia cries harder, the dam burst at last, and buries her face in Hannah's shoulder, holding tight.

Castiel stands up, swaying, hands covered in blood, and walks out of the room. He walks down to the lower levels, to the basement and the dungeon, where a huge square of concrete has been blasted out of the floor, and only an empty hole remains. He sits on his heels and puts his face in his hands. 

Sheol. 

Gehenna.

_Abaddon._

He should have remembered. He should have been smarter. He feels exhausted; worse, humiliated. He is not a hunter, not a human, with gaps and blurs in his memory. He cannot have been such a fool. He knows- he has always known: Hell is not a person, not a demon or even an angel. It does not fall but receives the fallen into itself.

Hell is a _place_.

 

 

IV.

The last time he spoke to angels- officially, not counting the rare, awkward, secretive visits of various cherubim- it was outside a ramshackle church in South Dakota, and he still had Sam Winchester's blood splashed down his coat sleeves. "We did you a favor," Naomi says, eternally, in his memory. "And now you have a choice to make." It was not much of a choice, from his perspective. But angels, he is highly aware, have always been fuzzy on the concept.

"Heaven or earth," he'd said. "Is that correct?"

"Come back to us, Castiel." She'd been kind with him. She'd spoken of family and duty. She'd used his name several times, which he recognized from human psychology as a tactic meant to engender trust. It was working, a little. He was very tired. "Come home. You have a place with us."

"You will-" he'd stumbled over this, hadn't been able to find a word that quite covered it. What is the right word for, you will take out my insides, and replace them, until I am unrecognizable? Until I am no longer myself, and I do not love the things I love? There simply isn't one. Not in English, and not in the language of angels. "Alter me. Again."

"We'll work out the kinks, Castiel." She'd smiled. "We'll get you healthy."

"And the Winchesters?" 

"Seems like the Winchesters are doing very well now, doesn't it?" She'd managed not to look like the name unsettled her on an atomic level. "Hell is closed. That fight's over. They won't be needing your help anymore, Castiel. And isn't that a good thing?"

"It is," he'd agreed. He'd glanced back at the church, and Naomi had read that gesture for exactly what it was: weakness. She'd closed in, tighter.

"I want to be very clear," she'd said, soft steel, gentle ice. "If you come with us, you will spend eternity in the arms of your family. You will be a part of something greater than yourself. We are going home- we are all going home, where we belong. Where you belong. You will be content, Castiel. You will be whole again. And if you stay here," her eyes had slid across the church and then away, at the scrub forest beyond. "This will be all that's left to you. You will be utterly alone. If not today, or tomorrow-" he'd taken her meaning, plainly. "Then eventually. Wherever they're headed, you won't be following. Understand me, I will not have a rebel in Heaven, Castiel. I will not have more games, more fighting, more divisions. I will not allow Heaven to be driven by willfulness, by whim. I will not have chaos. I will have order."

"I understand."

"It's us or them, Castiel." She'd actually held her hands out to him. "Us or them."

"Them," said Castiel. "Goodbye."

He didn't regret it. He's never regretted it. What he regrets is this:

"You good?" Dean had looked up at him when he'd come back in, silent, still bloodstained. Dean had Sam in his lap, Sam's head pillowed on Dean's thigh and his breath coming slow and deep. Dean's face had been broadcasting a hundred conflicting messages on a hundred channels, but mostly this: worry, and love. Both felt pure. "We good?"

"We're fine," Castiel told him. He'd put a hand on Dean's shoulder, and then raised it, hesitantly, to rest across Dean's cheek. "Everything is fine." 

He knows now why his brother was called the father of lies: birth one, and it will breed more. Each one in turn, endlessly. And one day, you will look up at the pyramid of falsehoods that you rest under, and you will spend the rest of your existence waiting for it to topple down upon you.

It never takes long.

 

 

.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "But now my heart is green as weeds,  
> grown to outlive their season.  
> And nothing comforts me the same  
> as my brave friend who says:  
>  _I don't care if forever never comes_."  
>  -Neko Case


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Creepy," Dean used to say; but then he'd turn around, and make Castiel close his eyes. Sometimes he would press a kiss to the skin of Castiel's throat, and sometimes he would just splash water into Castiel's face and then run away, like he wanted to be chased. Castiel thinks the word for that might be _mercurial_. It's more generous than what Dean used to say: "I'm just kind of a dick."

V.

He prays to Naomi, now. He tries to use language she will respond to. _Urgent and immediate catastrophe_ , he tells her. It's not much of an exaggeration. _There is a breach, and Hell threatens to unseal itself_.

"I don't see how this is my problem, Castiel." She is completely unchanged when she appears beside him, down to the flattering suit and the angle at which her bangs cross her forehead. She tilts her head at him, placid, efficient in her movements. "This is, as they say, no longer my area of interest."

"Abaddon," he says, and her eyes widen a fraction, "is everyone's problem."

"Yes," she says, after a moment. "It's worrying."

"Will you help?"

"Help you? I thought I made myself clear."

"Not for myself," he insists. "For humanity's sake." Naomi looks at him, down, and back up again. She looks genuinely disturbed, for the first time.

"Castiel," she says. "When I told you, us or them, did you think I meant the _Winchesters_?"

And then she's gone.

 

 

He finds Amelia in their medical bay, sitting against the wall with her legs drawn up to her chest and her arms tight around them. There's a gun at her side, on the floor. Hannah is asleep on a cot, with a heart rate monitor beeping steadily above her, and a glass of water ready for when she wakes. There is still broken glass and dented metal everywhere, though someone has swept it into piles. The lights are back on. On the upper floor, Jerome is re-wiring the security systems. Castiel sits beside her and draws his own knees up, loosely. For a long time, nobody speaks.

"I'm sorry," she says, at last. She turns to look at him, and he regards her back, evenly. "For all the stupid things I've said to you. I didn't understand. You've been there- you've just been there, my whole life. My entire life, you've been here, and I just didn't get it, at all. What you are. What you do. So," she says, taking a breath. "I'm sorry."

"You have nothing to be sorry for."

"Yeah, no," she says. "I have lots." She looks away. And then the faintest grin turns up the corner of her mouth. "Remember when you wouldn't zap that werewolf for me, in Sioux City?" He does. "God, I think I was sixteen. You took me home _and_ told my dad. I called you a fucking jerk." Castiel pretends to think about that for a moment.

"Apology accepted," he says, and Amelia chuckles into her kneecaps. He lets himself smile with her. She rests her head on one hand and watches him.

"My dad used to tell me stories about them," she says, eventually. "The Winchesters. He was just a little kid when he knew Sam. I don't think he wanted me to be a hunter, but he couldn't stop telling me those stories." She smiles sadly, fondly. He remembers her father, of course. Remembers the child he was: undersized, prone to flights of imagination, mutely worshipful of Sam, content to read or color in silence at the foot of his recliner. Remembers the man, too: technologically-minded, eager to advance their approaches. Castiel was not present at his death. A brain aneurysm in a motel bed, on a rare family trip to Chicago, with his grown daughter in the next room. She did not blame Castiel, or resent him beyond a brief shadow of doubt, or else she's buried those thoughts so far below the surface that he'd have to truly pry to find them. There has long been an unspoken agreement between him and these generations: he will not allow them to die needlessly, in the course of duty, eaten by ghouls or left bleeding in a haunted basement. He will not allow undue suffering. But neither can he preserve them eternally, as he might wish. Death has made it perfectly clear, over the years, what he considers his due. Castiel can cheat. He cannot steal outright. 

"Your father was proud of you."

"I know," she says. And more softly: "I know." She picks at the hem of her jeans. He waits for the question she's dreading. "So I take it you talked to the folks upstairs."

"Yes."

"They're not going to help us, are they?"

"No," he says. "We're on our own."

"Story of our lives," says Amelia.

 

 

The old conference table is a total loss; Jerome and Amelia break up the wood and they pull another table out of the library to sit in its place. Castiel feels a surge of irritation, a flush of irrational rage, in addition to the bottomless well of dread he seems to be carrying around: he was fond of that table. It was a place Dean used to set out dinners, to spread out maps; Sam's books were piled there, perpetually. It's only an object, meaningless in a greater sense, but he has good memories of that table and the conversations shared around it, the looks exchanged over it. Not to mention, the sounds Dean used to sometimes make on top of it. Castiel chooses to keep this and all associated anecdotes to himself when they all sit down together for the first time, at what Amelia is now calling the _war table_. 

"First things first," Amelia says, looking to Castiel. "Abaddon."

"A demon," he says, "old and powerful, who called herself a knight of Hell." 

" _Her name is destruction_ ," Jerome adds. He looks up from a journal. One of Sam's, Castiel knows. Leather-bound, battered. Dog-eared pages. "Says so here."

"Yes. More specifically, the _place_ of destruction."

"The journals say she came through time," Hannah says. "That she disappeared in the fifties, and reappeared in 2013."

"She followed Henry Winchester, and killed him there. Sam and Dean were unable to destroy her, but they managed to bind her using one of these-" he holds up an engraved bullet. "A devil's trap, fired into her skull. It held her in her body. They cut her apart and buried the pieces-"

"In the cellar," Amelia sighs. "So they've got her. Why would they want her?"

"The bullet holding her in her body, may have prevented her recall to Hell. We never considered that it would matter." It's mortifying to think of their oversight, their hubris, believing it all to be over. He tries not to dwell. It's not helpful, and they need helpful. "The Apocalypse of John says she's granted the keys to the pit. This has several meanings. But what I feel most likely-" he rubs the back of his neck for a moment, anxious in a way he hasn't been in years. "I believe she _is_ the key to the pit."

"Fine," says Amelia. "How do we kill the key to the pit?"

"I don't know." Castiel shrugs. "There are a few possibilities, but none certain."

"Crap," says Jerome.

"And," says Castiel, "there's something else."

"Oh, awesome."

"The angel we met. Samyaza. One of the fallen. I don't know how he's gotten free. But angels are far older than demons, and know as many tricks. I believe Samyaza is leading them, for now. He's taught them how to travel between vessels without being banished home." 

"The walking corpse gag, too?" Jerome says, angrily. "Is that one of his?"

"Yes. The summons on their arms must have made it possible for them to re-enter." Castiel looks at Hannah. "I'm sorry. I didn't realize-"

"Don't, Castiel," she says. "Don't. You've done everything for us." He falls silent. "Okay, so, we've got astrally projecting demons, and a rogue angel." She taps the top of the table, thinking. "Does a summons only go in one direction?" she asks, finally. "Like, is it an open line? Could you call back? Is there a spell that we could use to trace where it's coming from?"

"That's-" Castiel stares at her. "Yes. You could."

"Babe," says Amelia. "I think you're legitimately a flipping genius." Advanced placement, Castiel wants to say, but he realizes no one would understand.

 

 

He hasn't seen himself in a mirror for a long time. They are gathering supplies for the tracking spell, and one of those things is a large mirror brought up from storage: it used to hang in one of the communal bathrooms, before a round of renovations. He remembers looking into it over Dean's shoulder, watching the way Dean's face moved, the way light fell on the top of his head, the real and the duplicate in reverse. Endlessly fascinating.

"Creepy," Dean used to say; but then he'd turn around, and make Castiel close his eyes. Sometimes he would press a kiss to the skin of Castiel's throat, and sometimes he would just splash water into Castiel's face and then run away, like he wanted to be chased. Castiel thinks the word for that might be _mercurial_. It's more generous than what Dean used to say: "I'm just kind of a dick."

He looks the same as he did the last time he checked. His hair is still dark, with faint traces of what Dean called salt-and-pepper cut through it. He remembers making that change: adding lines to his face, grey hairs on his scalp. Dean was fifty-nine, and Castiel had just been mistaken for a younger relative by a mall clerk. Dean had laughed it off, but he was transparent to Castiel: it had wounded his vanity, maybe even his sense of propriety. It had never occurred to Castiel before, that such a thing- time passing- would affect the way others saw Dean, when Dean existed as an unchanging fact to him: a planetary body around which he now revolved. So he'd appeared one night to Dean like this, aged a little, worn a little. Irrationally afraid Dean would reject the changes: human vanity, he knew, was catching. But Dean had said nothing out loud, just taken him to bed. That was frequently Dean's method of communication. So Castiel had kept the grey, and by now, all the Chambers and Barnes and Tran children had become used to him like this. He could change back, if he wished. He no longer cares one way or another. It was easy enough to manipulate a vessel, though he's not sure that's what this is anymore. Strictly speaking. He's inhabited this body far longer than Jimmy Novak did. He will probably be wearing it while human civilization grows and falls and rebuilds and falls and rebuilds around him, for the next thousand years. 

Once he visited Claire Novak in this body, with his salt-and-pepper hair and brow wrinkles. He'd promised to look after her, to ensure her survival. She was a grown woman then, a counselor of troubled children, a loving stepmother, a member of a recreational rowing team. She'd stared at him and said, "Huh. So that's how my dad would have looked."

"More or less," he'd agreed.

"Thank you for that," she'd said. And then: "Get off my porch."

He can understand. 

"You in there?" Amelia says, now, waving a hand in front of his face. He blinks down at himself in the mirror one more time, and then up at her. "You ready?"

"I am," he says.

 

 

It is not extremely difficult to track a summons, once you know what you are looking for. It requires materials similar to those which made the original spell. For example, if you are looking for an angel, it is helpful to have an angel's blood.

"Ugh," says Amelia. She is holding a bowl under Castiel's forearm. "You couldn't have waited five seconds? I said I was getting a syringe."

"This is faster." While they no longer have the bodies, they have both copies of the markings, and the stored tissue samples Jerome took from their initial exams. It's enough to trace backwards. He draws the sigils in blood on the surface of the mirror, then presses a clean sheet of paper over the top, imprinting it. He burns this in a bowl, mixes the ashes with the tissue samples, and recites the summons. He can hear Amelia's skeptical thoughts, floating in the room like a little storm cloud over her head: _this is seriously going to work_? He opens his eyes just a crack, and glares over at her. She looks guiltily back at him. "It's probably going to work," he says. "And when it does, it'll be-" he starts, and trails off, watching the sigils on the mirror start to shift and dissolve. New letters form out of the old, leaving bloody streaks on the surface. A sensation of looming distance, an insistent tug, takes hold of Castiel. It's like being in the mouth of a whirlpool. It's powerful, irresistible. He feels urgently as if he ought to be somewhere else. "I'll come back," he promises, and before any of them have a chance to protest, he's gone.

He finds himself in a field of knee-high grass, yellowing and dead, running along a gravel road. Just beyond there's a murky, sluggish river: dirty, devoid of waterfowl. Far in the distance, there's a city. Apartment blocks and smokestacks. The remnants of a waterfront are everywhere. He walks ahead and discovers a burnt-out foundation, thick with weeds, and everywhere, broken glass in a dozen muddied colors. The old church, then. Destroyed, but not completely. Obviously of some significance to them, if only symbolic. He smells the air and finds a strange tang- not sulfur but spice- but in the split-second it takes him to place it, it's already too late.

"Casti _el_ ," says Abaddon. She drops her lighter. The flames go up around him, searing, close on every side. He turns to her, and she claps her hands in delight. There's rough stitching around her throat, crusted blood. It makes her look like a murderous doll. "I don't think I ever had the pleasure, back in the good old days." He says nothing. "Fire and brimstone, you remember. Unless you were the harp and sandals type." She circles the edge of the flames, looking him up and down. She smirks. "Not so much, I think. You look like a soldier to me. Yes sir, no sir." She grins. "Well, you're right on time," she says. "We're going to have so much fun."

 _Fucking South Dakota_ , he thinks.

They were ready for him. There are manacles covered in Enochian, in the names of dead archangels and the _grigori_ , fallen watchers in Hell. They send two demons in ruined bodies into the flames after him, to chain him, or else only to distract; when he fights back, tossing one into the ring of fire to make an exit, Samyaza is on him. Castiel manifests his blade and stabs upwards, cutting loose, but Abaddon is there: fast and savage. She claws at him, then ducks and spins out of his grip, forces him back against the flames. Samyaza wraps an arm around his throat. Castiel reaches upwards, around his head, plants one foot on the top of Samyaza's thigh and kicks upwards, wrestling them both to the ground. Abaddon lunges for him but Castiel is faster, this time: his blade meets her in the air and she sinks down onto it, hilt buried in her chest. He lies on the ground, pinned, panting, bloody, and Abaddon stares down, her stained lips in an _o_ of surprise.

And then she wraps her hands around Castiel's wrists and pushes herself upwards, grunting, while the hole in her chest makes a sucking, snapping noise. She drags the blade out and flips it in her own grip, kneels to press the tip to his heart. His arms are twisted behind his back and the cuffs snapped in place. And suddenly his limbs are leaden, his grace dulled. He can barely keep his eyes open as they drag him across the gravel and into the trunk of a car. Bruised and beaten. Trapped. He's failed them: Amelia, Jerome, Hannah. The Winchesters and the Campbells. Every living thing. He lies in the hot, close darkness and listens to the tinny sound of the electric engine as it hums him into an unknown distance. If he closes his eyes, he can feel the vibration of a combustion engine and the squeak of an old suspension, rumbling over the road. He imagines the wind rushing over his face and the radio static cutting in and out. For a moment, it's so real. And then the car stops, and the doors slam. He is pulled out of the trunk and dragged into a warehouse; he tries to observe as much as he can, but the names have been scraped off the door panels, the windows blacked out and warded. Someone has painted bloody sigils onto the concrete. They chain him against a pillar, arms above his head, on his knees. He can see two others, hooded and bound with rope, slumped over- unconscious but alive, he thinks- in a corner. Humans. One is in running shorts and sneakers. The other's feet are bare. Abaddon catches him looking, and smiles. "You like? We ordered these for you, specially." She pulls the hoods off: Julian Campbell. Aaron Winchester-Collingsworth. Castiel feels a swell of rage.

"They're useless to you," he says. Abaddon glances over her shoulder.

"It speaks," she says. "I was starting to think you'd lost your manners, angel."

"They know nothing."

"I don't care what they _know_ ," she says, disdainfully. "I care what they are." She holds Julian's face by the chin and shakes it loosely from side to side. "The mixers in my cocktail. Freshly squeezed Winchester-Campbell juice." She looks directly at Castiel. "Not a perfect match, of course. Just the best I could do on short notice." Blood, then. That's all she needs from them. In the final test Hell was sealed with blood: Sam's. The son of a Winchester and a Campbell. Her mixture might not work, to fully reverse the seal. But then again, it might: even a crack, a loosened bolt, a weakening, would be enough to unleash some form of Hell on earth. Enough to allow demons to regain their foothold. 

"You brought me here to witness," he says. "To punish me for my involvement."

"Punish you?" Abaddon tilts her head and smiles. "What a lovely idea. But no, sugar. You've got what I want." He stares up at her, not understanding. "When I open Hell," she tells him, "I'll be a queen. I will step over the corpses of my enemies and then I will bring my friends _here_." She comes closer and bends down in front of him, reaches forward, fists her hand in his hair and tilts his gaze upright. "I missed almost two centuries of fun- so many wars. So many genocides. Samyaza tells me people started putting razor blades in _candy_!" she laughs, and rocks his head back and forth. "This world is mine. But why stop there," she says, against his ear. Castiel shudders. "Why settle for conquering earth, when I could aim higher?" He jerks backwards in alarm. "Yeah, you're getting it," she says. "Think big."

"They'll put you down," he warns. "Like a dog."

"You know what I've heard?" she releases him, and stands back. "I've heard you're alone here. The last angel on earth, the little tin soldier." Her eyes go black. "They don't care anymore. They don't see. By the time they wake up, they'll already be plummeting from the sky in flames." 

"They'll stop you," he says. He doesn't know if it's a promise, or a prayer. 

"Don't worry, Castiel. When they burn, I'll put them out." Abaddon grins. She takes a black bag off the floor and sets it on a table. She begins to lay down instruments in neat rows. "Now," she says, thoughtfully. "Weren't you saying something about punishment?"

 

.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He prays to Kerubiel in warning. To Naomi, for the same. To any of his brothers and sisters who are still willing to listen. He strains to hear an echo of their presence, the slightest brush of consciousness. But there's only the quiet of his own thoughts, and the steady single drop of blood into the bucket. He prays to Jophiel and Sahaquiel, to old, estranged friends. He even prays to Anna, to Gabriel, in his delirium. He prays to Dean: _help me_ , he thinks. Make me stronger. I'm not a hammer, I have doubts. _Make me unafraid_.

VI.

He tries very hard not to scream.

"One more for me, angel," Abaddon says, with one hand on his throat and the other between his ribs. "One more, just for me. Let it all out." 

He tries very, very hard.

 

 

When she has wrung as much blood and sound out of him as she likes, she leaves him slumped against the pillar in his chains. He watches, boneless and leaking, as they string Julian up by his ankles and slit his throat. His blood goes into a bucket on the floor, running over Abaddon's shoes, and spilling out across the concrete. They leave him like that for a long time, dangling in a slow arc, until he comes to a stop. Castiel stares dully at the body, thinking about the boy's bare feet and video captures and his face resting against the desk, in love and afraid. Castiel's eyes cross and uncross with pain. For a second when they are unfocused, he is afraid he is looking at Sam.

Abaddon comes to Castiel and pats his cheek. "Stay," she tells him. "Mama's got a cherub to catch." And then for a very long time, he is alone.

He prays to Kerubiel in warning. To Naomi, for the same. To any of his brothers and sisters who are still willing to listen. He strains to hear an echo of their presence, the slightest brush of consciousness. But there's only the quiet of his own thoughts, and the steady single drop of blood into the bucket. He prays to Jophiel and Sahaquiel, to old, estranged friends. He even prays to Anna, to Gabriel, in his delirium. He prays to Dean: _help me_ , he thinks. Make me stronger. I'm not a hammer, I have doubts. _Make me unafraid_. 

When they return, Samyaza jerks Castiel upright and draws a thin blade across his throat; the fallen angel utters something in corrupted Enochian and cups his hands around Castiel's grace and draws it out on the exhale. No agony could compare to this. Castiel feels it in every nerve and blood vessel, in the hollow spaces inside Jimmy Novak's bones. Every fiber of his being is divided, torn, skinned away. And then it's gone. His grace slides out like a single iridescent feather of light, weightless, luminous. Samyaza twists it into a vial and then presses a hand over Castiel's throat, seals up the wound, as if he is showing him some kind of mercy. Castiel slumps into his bonds while Samyaza uncuffs him, then drops to the floor onto his face. He feels himself tugged forwards by his arms: perhaps they are going to bleed him, too, now. He should struggle. Aaron is still alive. There is still the chance that Castiel could get him free, or slow them down. Buy time. He _must_ move. He wrenches out of Samyaza's grip with a burst of effort, feeling his arms numb and weak from being strung overhead. Samyaza kicks him and pain spirals through him, up his back and into his skull. And then Abaddon rolls him over with one dainty foot and presses her heel into his throat. "Okay," she says. "You got a little fight left in you. I have to say I'm-"

-and a shotgun blast tears through Abaddon's face. Castiel rolls onto his stomach as gunfire explodes around him, shattering off bits of concrete into the air.

" _Castiel_!" Amelia hollers, into the chaos. " _CAS_!" The nickname gets him off the floor, automatically; he skids across the wet concrete on his knees and ducks behind a pillar. He can see, hazily, Abaddon rising to her feet, cheek in bloody shreds, as she's hit again in the face and shoulder. Jerome is in tactical gear by the doorway, in cover behind a crate. He's firing on Abaddon over and over again, stinging iron rounds that are mostly only irritating, but keep her moving backwards. Amelia's an angry blur to the left, in a small throng of blistered demons. She has the knife- Ruby's knife in a new handle, it will always be Ruby's knife to him, no matter who's held it since- and she's cutting throats as fast as they come at her. He sways and staggers in her direction, grabbing the closest demon and pulling it backwards; it gibbers and rakes nails across his arms until he snaps its neck, and Amelia spins to lodge the knife in its chest. It burns and he drops it, and she turns away to kick another one in the stomach. "Get out, get out," she hollers at him. But he spins, scanning for Samyaza. He's nowhere- somewhere. Castiel can't see him. Can't see much of anything through the dust and blood in his eyes. "Cas, come _on_ -" and Samyaza appears beside her and slams her bodily against the far wall. 

Castiel doesn't think. There's not a single thought in his head as he charges Samyaza, head down, and catches him around the middle; he drives him back on sheer surprise, not through any greater force. Samyaza's laughing. They roll on the floor and Samyaza tosses him aside, and vanishes again. Castiel looks for Amelia, wildly, afraid: but she's up, already pumping her knee into a demon's nose and flattening bone with a crunch. Jerome's still firing, but not at Abaddon anymore: Castiel knows Samyaza's found him. Castiel puts his palms on the floor to steady himself upright, and the tip of his fingers brush something cold. It rolls along the floor, clinking a little. The vial. The vial of his grace. He stares at it, and everything seems to go perfectly still. Castiel scoops it up into his fist.

"You are _not_ ," Abaddon shrieks, "going to _ruin this_!" He looks up and she's there, practically on top of him; she swings back and then lands a shattering hit on his jaw, blacking out the world for one instant. He reels but keeps his fist tight, the vial clutched in his hand. She kneels down and hits him again and his head thuds against the floor, rattling his teeth. He clenches the vial in his hand and feels it crack and start to shatter, feels the power well up in his palm- hot and raging, brighter than the sun. He holds it a second longer than he should. He'll never hold it again. "You little-" Abaddon has time to say, and then he reaches up and slaps his palm over her open mouth. The vial breaks and splits, releasing. She screams and clutches his wrist, but Castiel doesn't let go- he pushes off the floor with his free hand and grabs her by the neck, holds his grace tight against her face as it burns and expands. Grace floods up, spills out of her eyes and ears and lights her skin from the inside. She's hot as an inferno. Trembling, shuddering, shaking as the light fills her.

"Close your eyes!" he shouts. He doesn't know if anyone will hear him. If they're alive. His voice is hoarse, it will barely carry. "Close your eyes!" He shuts his own and Abaddon writhes in his arms. The light explodes and washes across him and he's blown back, away; it's too bright, blinding, searing, he can't move. He can't speak and he can't fight it, he can only be overwhelmed. There's too much- too much for his feeble grace, far too much. He doesn't understand. Too much. It multiplies around him and burns away his senses. Everything is gone. He disappears.

He feels heat on his face and hands, heat in his throat when he opens his mouth to scream, and then-

 

 

VII.

-he finds himself back in the garden.

No heavenly garden, this. Their garden, the one they made by hand: turning the soil over and pulling out the rocks, hammering together raised beds and trellises, training grapevines and beans and picking squash blossoms and watering through the droughts. He knows every inch of this place. He has pulled beetles off the leaves here, and edged the borders. He knows exactly what day this is by the color of the sky and the flowering of the peach trees. He knows exactly where he is. He is on his knees and just like before- like every time he closes his eyes- Dean is on his back in their little orchard, shuddering, one arm twisted at his side, the hat fallen from off his head and his pruning shears lost somewhere in the grass.

"Don't talk," Castiel is saying. "Let me-"

But Dean's weathered hands are around his, weakly, resisting, and they speak to Castiel as clearly as anything. Dean holds onto him and smiles and grimaces and smiles again. 

"No. Nono. It's okay, babe," Dean says. "Okay." His voice is breathy, choked. Another spasm goes through his chest and he clutches Castiel's hands, harder. "Sammy-"

"I'll get Sam," Castiel says, but Dean squeezes tight. "Dean, you need-"

"I'm so tired," Dean says, and the world stops.

Castiel can feel the heat of the sun on his back, the prickle of roots and dirt under his knees. He can feel the solid warmth of Dean's skin, the stuttering pulse in his wrists, the small hairs that rise on the backs of his arms; the jut of his belt into Castiel's upper thigh. He feels everything, and nothing at all: in the center of his chest, where a human heart is supposed to be, there is a cold emptiness, a rock like the moon, hovering. His face feels hot- he thinks he is crying- but inside he's freezing, airless, perfectly still. He doesn't know why. There is something wrong with him, perhaps. Something broken. 

"Let me save you," he says. Dean must allow him this. He has been soothing the smaller hurts for so long now, easing the tense muscles in Dean's back, correcting small calcium losses in the bones and the depletion of cartilage. It's a hunter's body, worn, battered. But there's no reason he cannot extend this, preserve this, heal it. Keep it. He has to keep it. It's the only thing he can. But Dean shakes his head, loosely, rolling back onto the dirt, smiling still, as if he knows something Castiel doesn't. Of course, it's the other way around: Dean believes, has believed for thirty years, that he is going to a place where Castiel can follow.

"Cas," Dean says. "Really love you."

"Dean," says Castiel.

"Gonna take a nap," Dean says, and closes his eyes.

 

 

VIII.

Castiel wakes up on his back. Alive and aching. His face throbs and his neck throbs and his back feels broken and his legs seem very far away. His hands hurt. The tips of his fingers feel raw and bloodied. He thinks he may have actually lost a couple of teeth. For a long time he lies there with his eyes shut, and tries to die.

"Don't be in such a hurry," Naomi says, from above him. He cracks his eyes open, and finds her face silhouetted against the ceiling. "You'll want to enjoy this, while it lasts." He tries to sit up. His ribs grind out a protest and his hip wobbles, and he falls back, gasping, onto his tender shoulder. She clucks her tongue at him. "Fine," she says. "One freebie." He feels fingertips against his forehead and then blissful coolness, tingling warmth. He flexes his hands and finds them whole. He sits up and his back is steady and his head no longer throbs. There's crusted blood on him- everywhere- but he can't feel a single bruise. He stares at her, mutely, not understanding. "You're welcome," she says, frowning. She stands up. "Consider our business concluded." He looks around the empty warehouse, the bloodstained floor, and then calls after her.

"Naomi!" He stands up, unsteadily. She stops and sighs. "Abaddon-"

"Very creative, Castiel," she says. "Original thinking. You've always had that-" she wrinkles her nose. "I suppose you could call it a gift." She folds her arms. "Your grace destroyed the key to Hell. The Winchesters shut the door, and you locked it." Her smile has a hint of warmth behind it. "Congratulations."

"Have you located Samyaza?"

"We're dealing with him," she says. The hint of warmth is gone. "The secrets of Heaven were not his to distribute."

"And- my friends," he says.

"Castiel, I'm not here to clean up all your messes," she huffs. "We put back your stray Winchester with the dessert fixation, that ought to be more than enough." He gives her a level look. "But please tell the young woman with the knife-"

"Amelia," he says, in a rush. "Amelia."

"She needs to be more careful where she puts it." Naomi sounds irritated. Castiel looks at the front of her jacket, and back up at her face, and feels something bubble up in him- something good and fierce and raw. It comes out as a laugh. It's so loud and so hard, it shakes his heart. "Yes," says Naomi. "Hilarious." Castiel wipes at his eyes, which seem to be leaking again. His legs feel a little wobbly.

"I'm a man," he says. It sounds frightened. He feels- frightened. His voice is weak. He can feel his heart pounding in his chest. "Just a man," he says. He looks at Naomi. "No. I don't know what I am, anymore."

"I know what you aren't," Naomi says, carefully.

"I will never go back to Heaven," he tells her. Naomi looks at him for a long moment.

"Not in the way I hoped," she says.

And she's gone.

 

 

Outside, he finds Jerome slumped against the side of the car and Hannah holding a bloodied rag to his forehead. He is trying to push her away, claiming that he is a grown man, and Amelia is telling him he is no such thing, while pacing back and forth with the knife still in her hand. They are arguing furiously at top volume.

"I'm going-"

"She said to get out-

"I'm not leaving him in there with _her_ ," Amelia hisses, and Castiel clears his throat. "Castiel," she says, surprised. She looks him up and down. "Are you-"

"I'm fine," he says. "Everything is fine." 

 

 

On the long ride back to the bunker, Hannah leans forward between the seats and digs around in Castiel's ripped-up coat pocket for a minute. He allows it. She produces the busted shell of his loathed communication chip and holds it out on the flat of her palm. 

"This is how I tracked you," she says. "Our own personal angel GPS." She smiles at him, and pats his arm. "You never, ever turn it off. That's why your batteries are always halfway dead."

"I owe you my life," he says. "All of you."

"Yeah, okay," Amelia says, visibly uncomfortable. "No problem."

"Amelia drove like she was the demon," Jerome adds. "Our tracker estimated the distance at six hours, twenty minutes. She got us there in four forty-five."

"Thank you," Castiel says. "Without that-"

"No more _without thats_ ," Amelia says, and turns the radiolink on. It fills the car with peppy, upbeat music. The pop classics of 2066. She looks at him across the seats. "You're one of us," she says, looking slightly pink in the cheeks. Her hands are tight on the steering wheel. "You're family. This is what we do."

"Aww," says Hannah.

"Shut it," says Amelia. She turns the music up. And Castiel thinks to himself, for the first time in many, many years: _I'm going home_.

 

 

The room that used to be Dean's room was turned into storage a very long time ago, but the bed frame is still in there, flattened upright between the wall and stacks of old shelving. It takes him a few days to move the old lamps and outdated electronics and file boxes out, and then the shelving units, and then to disturb the decade-old layer of dust on the floors and on every fixture. Hannah helps him tape and paint the walls. He moves the bed frame into position and then discovers that there is no extra mattress. He says nothing to anyone, but then Amelia finds him sleeping on the floor in a bedroll.

"Oh my God, Castiel," she says, and drives him to the MondoMart. They get a mattress- memory foam- and a bedside lamp that he puts on top of a filing cabinet. "We can get you a dresser," she says. "Like, a real human dresser."

"This has drawers," he says. He demonstrates. "It's perfectly adequate." Amelia throws her hands up. Later, he will discover a new rug in his room.

"Hannah got it for you," Amelia tells him.

"Amelia picked it out," Hannah says. And Jerome comes downstairs one day with milk-crates full of ancient, yellowed paperbacks from the library storage closets. When Castiel opens one of the oldest and most battered books- after sneezing for five minutes on the dust and mildew- he sees a child's handwriting on the inside flap. _Property of Sam Winchester_ , it says, in a slanted, imprecise scrawl. He closes the cover. _Treasure Island_. Castiel finds he can't say anything at all. Jerome smiles at him, and then leaves him alone to dig through the rest. They are being incredibly kind to him, incredibly gentle. He feels useless but they have all insisted that his knowledge alone is worth its weight in protein supplement. They've provided him with a type-tablet and paper journals, asked him to write down everything he knows, everything that might be useful, all the things that never quite ended up in the archives because Castiel was, once, an archive unto himself. So in the evenings he sits with the type-tablet, talking slowly into its voice processor, and correcting its many spelling mistakes. 

"Jegudiel," he says, patiently. " _Je-gu-di-el_." And mostly he draws in the journals, filling pages with dotted lines and swirls, and eventually vines and swirls, and finally flowers. He draws flowers and leaves and bees circling them, over and over. He hides the journals under his bed and feels ridiculous about it. And sometimes there are nightmares: he's in Abaddon's hands again, or Naomi's, and the floor is full of corpses. Sometimes he is god again, and Dean is afraid. Sometimes Dean is gasping on his back in the grass, slowly turning pale. Sometimes he dreams about Hell, and the things he saw there: dreams he failed and fell, that he was torn apart on the rack by the righteous man, that Sam Winchester said yes and never jumped. He has nightmares about the psychiatric hospital, and sometimes he wakes sweating, wondering if any of this is real. The only proof then is his human heartbeat, pounding against his lungs; his very human cold sweats. He is going to ask Hannah about her white-noise machine.

But mostly he dreams about Heaven, about the rows of flowers that will need tending, the peaches swinging low on every branch, eternally in season. He dreams of Dean at thirty-eight, with a scruffy beard starting, his back still strong and his eyes bright, and his arms turning brown in the sun. He dreams that Dean will watch him coming from far off, and that when Castiel gets there, Dean will say, _Christ, Cas, what took you so fucking long_? And Castiel will fold him into his arms and put his nose into Dean's neck and he'll say- nothing, he won't talk at all. He'll laugh. He'll laugh and Dean will hold him tighter and tell him, _you're a nutcase_. He's so ready. He dreams it night after night, and he never gets tired of it, never gets tired of waiting, now that he knows he is waiting for something.

Until then: he is thinking about working on the garden.

 

.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “It is not down on any map;   
> true places never are.”   
> ― Herman Melville


End file.
